An American Mindset

Karl Marx proposes a bleak and realistic understanding of capitalist hegemony and its effects. He points out the existence of the owners of the means of production (Bourgeoisie) and the workers (Proletariat). He recognizes our cultural shift and psychological shift from our ends as products of us to ends as capital. The separation of labor, the distancing of ourselves from our material expression, makes our work hollow and unproductive. It is wasted time and its meaningful properties come simply from our survival rather than from a sense of self worth.

The guest that came to class described an oddly analogous situation in her own work. She, an executive producer, owns the means to produce shows. Not literally since the network executives own the equipment, but in a metaphorical sense she has the power to initiate production and choose her workers. The working conditions for her workers are dismal, and in fact some are barely even working for survival. At $75 a day, working 21-hours is as close to submitting one’s self to slavery as it gets in America. It is true that she herself began there and worked her way up. She followed the timeless trend of American bootstrap pulling, but is her success and the success of others like her indicative of a system that rewards its proletariats? Or is it, like Marx would want us to believe, another way in which the bourgeoisie masks its profound ability to sit on the shoulders of the proletariat in order to be carried as high up the mountain of prosperity anyone can get without being put down? If only the workers that prove themselves to be unwavering and limitlessly self-denying make it to the level of foreman, doesn’t that point out that those are the workers the bourgeoisie can get the most bang for their buck? Isn’t the job of an executive producer orders of magnitude harder than picking up cigarette butts? Doesn’t it require huge amounts of stress and time commitment? Truly, the executive producer is the machine, the workers are the cogs. The machine has more responsibility for the production, but what it produces is still entirely separate from it. Does an executive producer for ANTM produce a model? Or a show? Or viewership? Or more jobs? I would probably say no. The model is not produced since its materiality never changed from when it wasn’t designated as model. The show is produced by the network. The viewership is produced by the show. The jobs are produced by the available cash. Truly, the higher up you are on the proletariat ladder, the more weight you have to carry. The American Mindset is then simply a competition to see who can carry the bourgeoisie higher up the mountain; who can impose upon themselves a harsher condition of labor.